Current contemporary lifestyles have produced deterioration of our actual surroundings, the ever-increasing need for supplies, increasing competitiveness, a developing division between the wealthy and poor and the looming threat of global warming, with further ill-effects.
On completion of his education, he taught in Krishnamurti Foundation Trust for 14 years at Krishnamurti’s Brockwood Park. Jenkins chose to do something on his own. Krishnamurthy urged him not to be “a blueprint.” He inherited property from his Grandmother that he invested in buying a land near Kodaikanal. Jenkins began looking for a place in India. In 1989 found this scenic 100-acre area, Palni Hills, 18 km from Kodaikanal.Tamilnadu, India.
Jenkins, now, 68 a British social anthropologist, thinker, and teacher. He has shown how to live naturally without damaging the nature, in his school founded since 1991. He got inspiration from J Krisnamury to remain original in doing everything in life and established a nature-friendly school.
The Harry Potter-like world comes to the real life.
Photo Credit: K Sundar
His school is self-contained and dedicated to the natural and original formation of the world in a practical way. He is very inspiring to those who want to alter the world for the betterment. The world needs to change over and become natural, not influenced by chemical fertilizer and synthesized pesticides.
Students from the age of 8 to 19 here get taught aquatics, yoga, bird watching, horse riding, trekking and outside and indoor games. The extra-curricular activities are fantastic. In the past, they have also constructed water dams and a span over a small creek that flows in the school.
“I did not have a control plan as people normally do; first, we constructed a small house with a mess and a bathroom. Then while we felt the need for another, so we made one more and so on,” says Jenkins. Now, the vast school campus that has all that we required for boys and girls hostels with a common dining hall, classrooms, activity rooms, labs, library, games like, badminton, swimming pool, and an auditorium in the offing.
The first two students were from Ladakh and the Gulf that rose to 51. The Student to teacher ratio is at 4:1. It was real hard to overcome the feeling of being foreign and something way out of the locals against their way of living. The locals even cheated them on many fronts of meeting the daily needs.
The students get grouped as per their level of pick up and understanding and not as per age. The local children below poverty level get free education and living along with other students.The students learn varied exceptional education with many skills, such as Maths and Farming, Science subjects with Carpentry, Woodwork, and masonry. The teacher and others are encouraged to have the dual role of practical living and not just the theory.
The school rightly quotes of self-generation of power, be it solar or hydro-electric. Bio gas is used actively for the cooking and provides the energy. More than 26 years, the institution has investigated and produced several state-of-the-art Appropriate Technologies to give all of their energy needs.
://www.sholaicloaat.org/v2/index.php?